


Alfred

by Sarita1046



Category: Original Work
Genre: Concentration Camps, Gen, Historical, Holocaust, Jewish Character, Nazis, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 02:29:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7023088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarita1046/pseuds/Sarita1046
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, three lives come together in a way that highlights the desperation for survival.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alfred

The white moth fluttered softly by the dull glow of the lamp, its wings capturing the gentle light not unlike the glow of the moon far above. Ruth couldn’t remember a night when the little creature hadn’t graced the camp with its presence, drawn to the flame that stood just out of reach of the tall metal gates. She couldn’t touch it, though she’d tried to reach it many times. It was a hair too far every time, out of grasp just as freedom had been for her and her family a while now. 

“Rutie!” Max called, breaking Ruth out of her reverie. “Has the soup arrived yet?” 

Ruth turned to go and tend to her younger brother who had recently fallen ill from the cold of late winter. Wrapping him in a blanket, Ruth reassured him in a soft voice as she did every evening, that the soup would come and that soon they would have medicine for him. In her heart, however, Ruth was simply thankful that they had lived to see another day. With her brother’s ailing health, she feared his inability to work. Everyone knew that those unable to work were sent to their deaths.  
It was at times like this when Ruth would comfort Max and herself with memories of Rabbi Nachman, leader of their family’s congregation back in their home of Bacharach, a small village in the Rhine Valley. The young rabbi was a vivacious spirit, always regaling his listeners with stories from the Torah. Once they were separated from mama and papa, Ruth had used the beloved stories their rabbi had told to help her brother remember the days when they were a whole family. The young man was always speaking of preserving the Jewish faith despite all odds, particularly after the distrust toward Jews began to grow throughout Europe.  
Sometimes, during her often embellished tales, Ruth would forget that she herself had been quite young when Rabbi Nachman had left Bacharach for Palestine. Papa had said that he had seemed to predict the Nazi takeover many months before they were even sent to the ghettos. She never learned the rabbi’s first name. She couldn’t even remember his voice clearly, much less his face. Yet, Max believed that she did and that was all that mattered. 

Ruth couldn’t remember the exact nature of their first encounter. She had seen him in passing a few times and taken note how he did not spit or curse at her through the gate, as many of them did. This one was different, more indifferent. Of course, indifference was welcome anytime to hostility. 

Tonight he spoke to her, seeing Max laying in her lap coughing. “Here. For the boy.” 

Ruth almost didn’t want to take the bowl of water from the soldier, certain it contained poison. But the boy took a sip and quieted down. That was how it began. Max did not improve but the German soldier would come out to visit the two Jewish children, nearly every other evening for several weeks. He even began telling the two stories, almost as if he wasn’t gaining pleasure from their imprisonment but was simply doing a duty and trying to make the best of it. 

“What is your name?” Ruth asked him.

“That I cannot say. It is no safe venture to visit here.” Then why do you come? Ruth thought. “I do not approve of what the Führer does to your people. If it were my choice, I would not even be here. I had to serve in place of my older brother Alfred who had grown sickly. It was out of family honor that I came. Every day that passes pains me. Still, the need for familial preservation demanded it.”

They spoke in greater lengths each time, him expanding on how he believed that the German people, desperate after the Great Depression, followed Hitler too easily. They believed that he would provide a quick fix to all their problems. Instead, he brought upon much greater strife.  
Then came the night when Max really couldn’t breath. Ruth was frantic and she begged the sympathetic soldier to please let him have some of the army’s medicine. 

“I am truly sorry, Ruth,” he said, his eyes glistening, “They would recognize the missing bottle.” At that, Ruth actually grabbed the chain link fence and rattled it, raising her voice with tears pouring down her cheeks. He had not entered the space behind the gates as he sometimes did when his fellow soldiers weren’t about. Only when Ruth’s sobs quieted her voice did the soldier cease his warnings that the others would hear her shouts.  
Less than an hour later, Max died in her arms. The soldier didn’t see. He had finished his shift. They were alone. Ruth thought of mama, papa and Rabbi Nachman as her tears pulled her to sleep.

The soldier didn’t come around again after that for some time. Ruth was relieved, as she likely would have hurled herself at him had she laid eyes on him again. They had taken away Max’s body. She felt a cold, dark hole in the middle of her chest. She now had to watch the moth flutter around all by herself--no one else at her side to admire its strange beauty.  
That was when Ruth met Ania, the sarcastic and feisty old Polish woman who had come in on transportation from a neighboring camp to the south. The two women communicated in Yiddish. Although in poor health, Ania was surprisingly lively. Her stubbornness was truly unrelenting, evident in her habit of snagging newspaper clippings from just outside the fence, articles both old and recent.

“We have to be prepared for when they come to rescue us,” she would say, grinning as she pulled scraps of soiled paper from the muck at the foot of the fence. 

Ruth was never sure who she meant--the British, the French, the Americans, the Russians? Who would come? Would they come? If they cared, why hadn’t they already arrived?

More weeks passed. The soldier was nowhere to be seen. Ruth’s resolve weakened, Ania’s spirit the only inspiration she felt to continue on. If an elderly woman could see this through, so could she. She had to survive for her family, either to reunite with them if they had lived or to salvage their lineage if they had perished. Thoughts of her Rabbi kept alive the hope too—that spark of hope that someday, they would all meet again in their ancestral homeland, to the East.  
Ania and Ruth spoke often about what Palestine must look like now. They sincerely hoped that enough Jews would escape the horrors of Europe and find refuge in the land of Judea. Ruth imagined magnificent rushing rivers and radiant sunlight, the likes of which she had never seen. Did the air there truly smell of honey?

At the start of the spring showers, the soldier returned. Ruth had told Ania of his gentleness, but was more crestfallen than she had expected, his reappearance bringing back the pain of losing Max. Ania was a trooper though, not even allowing Ruth to acknowledge his presence. Ruth couldn’t help but smile at her friend’s audacity. They would survive. They must.  
Ruth and Ania spent many a night recounting the past and contemplating the future, Ruth entertaining Ania with stories of Rabbi Nachman and the older woman telling of her own childhood in Krakow. The soldier often stood by, not saying a word against them speaking in Yiddish. 

Ania’s next suggestion surprised Ruth even more than she had thought possible from the elderly lady. “Write him a letter.” Ruth stared.

“Write your Rabbi Nachman a letter. If God wants him to receive it, he will. Put it in your water canister and toss it high over the fence, as far as you can manage. He must know we’re thinking of him. He must remember his brethren out here in this Hell.”

So she did. The friendly soldier provided her with quill and a bit of parchment. Several days passed and she forgot about the note. That is, until…

“Rutie! He’s answered! Your soldier friend has given me this letter!”

Rutie wouldn’t read the letter or let herself cry, especially not in front of the soldier. She wouldn’t let the tears fall until much later that night, after Ania had already fallen asleep and she could read the letter by the soft glow of the lamp. The steady sound of moth’s wings fluttering accompanied the Rabbi’s voice as she imagined it in her head. 

Dearest Ruth,

I write from you here in Palestine. It is indeed the land of our ancestors, the land of our God. Trust me when I say that you and your family are in my mind every day. Every day, this land is returning to being Israel, just as the Allied powers gather to rescue you and your brave companions. Rest easy, my child, we will all be together very soon.

May God watch over you. I am.

Reb Nachman

 

Ruth was truly speechless, in both heart and mind. God had answered her prayer. She had hope now. She would find her parents. With that, she finally allowed the tears to fall freely, the drops blotting out the edges of some words on the parchment. The only witness to these tears minded his own business, enthralled as always by the loving flame of the gaslight.  
Several weeks passed and still more letters with more responses. Now more than ever, Ruth felt the power to go on.  
Ruth was awakened the next morning by someone’s hands frantically shaking her. The young girl looked up perplexed into the outraged gaze of Ania.  
“It’s him! It’s him!” she nearly shouted, enraged. Ruth sat up, dazed. It couldn’t have been far past dawn yet, the grey light the only sign of the approaching sun.  
The older woman continued in a frenzy. “I was gathering clips this morning as always and I’ve found this!” she pushed a tattered clipping into Ruth’s hand. “Look at the photograph!”

At first, what caught Ruth’s eye was the scrap’s reference to a Nachman, a rabbi of a German village on the Rhine. Her eyes widened in horror as she read on:

 

\--March, 1938 “Rabbi Alfred Nachman was apprehended by Russian soldiers at the eastern Polish border in an attempt to cross into Palestine and escape the ghettos of Europe. He evaded his captors soon after and fled, never to be seen again.”

 

Ruth froze. Three years ago the article had been written. That was when her eyes rose to the photograph above the news story. It was him. The soldier. Her soldier. He had been by her side the entire time—helping the enemy to murder his and her own people.  
Ruth had heard of Jews fighting for the German army before but not for many  
years. She now realized what a perfect escape one could make if he succeeded passing himself off as a soldier in the SS army. He must have entered early, before anyone had grown too suspicious. Anything to survive…  
She knew what she had to do. With so few survivors left in the camp, there wouldn’t be many soldiers standing guard. That evening, she was actually coldly glad when he came to see her. As he approached her, Ruth made a move she never would have dreamt of before—and clearly he hadn’t either. 

“Rabbi Nachman,” was all she said before his eyes widened. 

As he hesitated and tried desperately to explain, she let her rage take over. Moving faster than she ever thought possible, she pulled the pistol from his belt and aimed it at him.  
He simply stared. “Rutie, please understand. I never meant for any of this. It was simply a matter of survival, of preservation. God wishes only peace between us all. What would you have done?”

Rutie was now numb with anger. “I am my people. They are all that matter.”

The man before had a gaze cold as ice. “Would you really kill a member of your own community? Your family?” 

In an even, deadly tone she replied, “I had a family. You took them from me. All this time, I was writing to you and you were right here all along. You saw to the annihilation of your own community. To save yourself, Alfred. All that ever mattered to you was self-preservation. Consider this the true preservation of our people--leading these prisoners to freedom.” 

As the soldier frantically lunged for Ruth, she leapt out of his path at the last moment and struck him as hard as she could over the head with his pistol. The other guards would come searching soon but too late. Ruth had already snagged the keys from Alfred’s belt and escaped with Ania and the remaining survivors out of the camp. 

As night settled the air, distant thunder sounded from over the mountains. During the procession out the metal gates, the little white moth left its haven of light for the first time to settle on Ruth’s shoulder. 

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to my third cousin Ruth Gold who lost her entire family in the camp, Transnistria.


End file.
